US Gov't Orders 73,000 Private Websites Offline

joeszilagyi sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "... according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities. Blogetery.com has been with host BurstNet for 7 months, but on Friday July 9th the site disappeared. ... Due to the fact that the authorities aren't sharing information and BurstNet are sworn to secrecy, it is proving almost impossible to confirm the exact reason why Blogetery has been completely taken down. The owner does, however, admit to handling many copyright-related cease and desists in the past, albeit in a timely manner as the DMCA requires."

Comments

The fact is, US is just as bad as China

[SquarePixel]

Who said US doesn't pull stunts like China? I think I've heard so many times on slashdot.

US is just as bad. It's just for different interests (protecting the money and cash flow of huge corporations versus ensuring that the people in the country don't start bloody revolts).

Twist it how you want to, but the fact remains that both countries act like assholes and US is in the same level.

Re:The fact is, US is just as bad as China

[PaladinAlpha]

We're deep enough into this thread where this may not be read, but allow me to offer my view.

Marriage has been for years a way to ensure an equal distribution of males to females. Attraction develops from ancient rites of selection which favored those that were stronger, faster, and more likely to survive. However, as a requirement for society to develop, we suddenly need "experts" in various fields not directly connected to survival -- i.e. the person good at farming may not be "attractive", the person who knows how to predict the weather may not be "attractive", and so forth. We'll call these "beta mates", and under a non-rigorous system they would simply never mate, and therefore have much less reason to participate in society -- depriving it of their expertise.

There is another factor, as well. Historically, it has been shown that in unstructured environments, a greater number of females mated than males. The deduction to be made is that females will flock to a male they consider attractive, accepting the presence of other mates in exchange for the higher attraction and potentially stronger offspring. That we don't see this as often nowadays is precisely because of the point I'm about to make:

Structured monogamous marriage is a method of distributing males and females equally, and provides all mates ("alpha" and "beta") with a reward for participating in society -- the "alphas" benefit from the additional expertise brought by the "betas", and the "betas" have a very high chance of successful mating. This was for quite some time enforced through arranged marriage, and I would even make the argument that arranged marriage is what made civilization possible.

Polygamy would lead, ultimately, to alpha flocking again, and greatly reduce the encouragement for beta experts to contribute meaningfully to society. I would further argue that we have begun to see the effects of this in the USA with the considerable reduction in the sanctity of marriage and a (I would postulate) corresponding drop in technological leadership worldwide.

Re:The fact is, US is just as bad as China

[Un pobre guey]

No need. It's called commercial pop-culture. The beauty of it is that everyone gets it beforehand, like you, practically from birth.

You don't see what is right before your eyes. You think that being able to post drivel on blogs is a showcase of freedom. We have among the worst education, medical care, and retirement policies in the industrialized world yet you exclude it from the discussion. We have a deep recession thanks to tyrants and their politician-minions, and you exclude it. We are fighting "The War on Drugs" and "The War on Terror" for the sole purpose of having tyrants loot our society side-by-side with drug traffickers and the financiers of Sunni Islamic terrorism, and you exclude it. We happily allow immigrants to come in and work as slave labor, then do everything to punish them and deny them services they have already paid for via the taxes withheld from their paychecks, and you exclude that as well from the discussion. But Oh My! We can post whatever we want on Slashdot and HuffPost and thousands of other forgettable sites! That proves we are free!

Wake the fuck up.

This is just the beginning.

[the roAm]

Mark my words. This is only the beginning of high-profile shutdowns.
The nest has been stirred and the wasps are now out in full force.
There is, however, a light at the end of the tunnel.
You cannot get by with stuff like this without angering a lot of people.
Enough angry constituents and things will start to change.

Lets just hope for the best as that's all we can really do.

Re:National Security?

[bsDaemon]

They probably seized some equipment as evidence in an investigation and the numbers are just grossly over-inflated for sensationalist reasons. Seizing a couple of servers that have 10,000 customers each isn't the same thing as "ordering the sites off-line" -- it's seizing the hardware in order to protect chain of evidence and integrity of the data seized. It's still kind of a dick move, but I'm not really going to take the bitching of people who seem to be perfectly willing to watch movies but don't want to pay for them.

yeaaah

[unity100]

in china government orders your site down, because they dont like it.

in usa private people and companies order your site down, because they dont like it. they just need to use an excuse for invoking dmca.

the only difference is, there is a storefront in usa, and people think they are 'free'.

Fascism is coming

[AthleteMusicianNerd]

This didn't start with Obama either. This is ingrained in our society, and accepted by many in the name of national security. That's a very grave mistake. Books like "The Federal Mafia" have been banned, and New York Times reporters have been silenced by being thrown in jail. It is very troubling that this trend continues, and everyone should be protesting it.

Re:I would like to help, but why kid myself

[elrous0]

Rand Paul and the other libertarian Tea Partiers are just being used by the Republican establishment. The second Republicans are back in charge, they'll purge the party of libertarians and anything related to *individual* rights will be quickly shunted aside (only corporations and the wealthy will have the government "off their back"). Paul is just a dupe.